Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis

Al Gore is the cofounder and chairman of Current TV, an Emmy Award-winning, independently owned cable and satellite television news and information network for young people based on viewer-created content, citizen journalism, and investigative reporting. He is also cofounder and chairman of Generation Investment Management, a firm focused on a new approach to sustainable investing. Gore is a partner with the venture capial firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a member of the Board of Directors of Apple, and a senior advisor to Google. He is a visiting professor at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and chairs a nonprofit organization designed to help solve the climate crisis-the Alliance for Climate Protection-to which he is donating 100 percent of his earnings from this book.

 

Gore was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1976 and then to the U.S. Senate in 1984 and 1990. He was inaugurated as the 45th vice president of the United States on January 20, 1993, and served for eight years. He is the author of the bestsellers Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, An Inconvenient Truth, and The Assault on Reason and was featured in an Academy Award-winning documentary. He was a corecipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

 

Al Gore lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

As they did with An Inconvenient Truth, former Vice President Gore and Mrs. Tipper Gore will donate 100 percent of the proceeds of the book to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group dedicated to spreading awareness about the climate crisis and how to solve it. Our Choice features 100 percent recycled paper, locally produced and sourced editions, low VOC inks, and is carbon neutral.

"In a new book that marks an evolution in his thinking, Al Gore recognizes that the debate over climate change can be more about doing well while doing good."—John Meachan, Newsweek
 
"Authoritative, exhaustive, reasoned, erudite."—Sharon Begley, Newsweek

 

“The clarity of his argument and the fissile power of his analysis combine to elevate Our Choice into the top-ranking environmental books of our time."—Financial Times

 

"There is no greater champion of the climate imperative than Al Gore. [He] distills his mastery of the topic into clean, readable prose, and illustrates it with gorgeous glossy photos and accessible—nd eye-opening—charts. After you read Gore's book, you will see why the choice must be made right now."—Huffington Post

"Ken-Burns-meets-global-warming, with vivid diagrams of how technologies work and lavish color photos."—Philadelphia Inquirer

"In his almost 30 years of crusading against global warming, Al Gore has worn a variety of hats. In roughly chronological order these include: congressman, senator, author, vice president, traveling evangelist, filmmaker, investment adviser, and Nobel Peace Prize winner. Now, with the publication of his new book, Our Choice, Gore has unveiled a fresh and most unexpected talent: the book’s opening chapter of concludes with a poem he wrote—21 lines of verse that are equal parts beautiful, evocative, and disturbing . . . Our Choice devotes entire chapters to a range of various solutions, from solar, wind, and energy efficiency to agriculture and forestry policies that actually reverse global warming by sucking carbon dioxide from the air and storing it in soil and plants. In these chapters, we find much the same Al Gore who in 1992 published the best-seller Earth In The Balance: a science wonk who has plainly done lots of research and deep thinking and wants to share every last bit of it with you. It’s a valuable service, especially these days, when every week seems to bring developments in green technologies. Still, the level of detail and the sheer complexity and length of many of Gore’s sentences will doubtless lead many readers to skim these sections. Not so the poem. Gore wrote it, I’m told, because his editor nixed his request to include a separate chapter on the impacts of climate change. After all, Our Choice is supposed to be about solutions, not gloom and doom. (The most common criticism of An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary that won Gore an Oscar in 2007, was that it was silent on what to do about global warming.) Undeterred by his editor’s ruling, Gore re-imagined his impacts chapter in poetic form. The result is a surprisingly accomplished, nuanced piece of writing. The images Gore conjures in his (untitled) poem turn a neat trick: they are visually specific and emotionally arresting even as they are scientifically accurate . . . Another reader-friendly feature of Our Choice is the multitude of stunning photographs it contains. There are actually more pages of photos than of text. The shots range from a thousand solar panels atop the Vatican to a worker standing amid blackened, dead fish after a sewage spill near Rio de Janeiro, to a close-up of George W. Bush receiving a kiss on the cheek from Saudi King Abdullah after Bush was awarded the King Abdul Aziz Order of Merit in 2008. (Who says Gore lacks a sense of irony?) It’s usually a mistake to read too much literal meaning into poetry. But the final lines of Gore’s poem certainly apply to the governments that will gather in Copenhagen from December 7 to 18 for what is regarded as humanity’s last chance to avert absolutely catastrophic climate change. 'The shepherd cries / The hour of choosing has arrived / Here are your tools.' Is Gore himself that shepherd? No matter. What counts is that the hour of choosing has indeed arrived and, as documented in Our Choice, we do have the tools to survive—if we choose to employ them."—Mark Hertsgaard, Vanity Fair

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